A Remarkable Perversion of Undervote Studies. The purpose of undervote rate studies is to detect the loss of valid votes and attempt to identify and eliminate the causes. However, in a remarkable perversion of that purpose, this bill grants the EAC authority to use such studies to expand the disenfranchisement of historically disenfranchised communities in some jurisdictions to other jurisdictions in which “they” are predominant.
Furthermore, this provision would deter investigation into the causes of high undervote rates where they are most needed. Instead, without evidence, it falsely asserts that the causes are already known, that this bill supplies sufficient remedies, and that the issue of undervoting needs no more investigation. High undervote rates reported in future elections could be used as justification for adjusting the benchmark for those and other jurisdictions — expanding the disenfranchisement even more.
3. Examples of Other Problems in the Bill
While the following problems pale in comparison to those discussed above, they are worth mentioning.
¨ Like H.R. 811, this bill fails to enforce the first requirement of HAVA, which requires that voting systems permit the voter to verify the ballot before the ballot is cast and counted. S. 1487 continues to allow the use of unverifiable, invisible, electrical charges inside a computer to count as ballots for the all-important initial count.
¨ The bill has flaws similar to H.R. 811 in the “ban” on wireless communications and Internet connections. S. 1487 bans only a few kinds of communications and allows enough other kinds that an election could easily be tampered with by remote communications.
And, an odd remark seems to prop a door open for future experiments with voting by the Internet — a concept dropped by the federal government several years ago after a task force the Department of Defense hired to study the idea reported that the structure of the Internet rendered it impossible to make Internet voting secure. (A Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), January 20, 2004)
Yet, S. 1487 states: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit any study on Internet voting required under this Act or any other provision of law.”
Since S. 1487 does not mention any study on Internet voting, is this comment in anticipation of an amendment to this bill or in anticipation of another bill to be introduced to study or require Internet voting?
¨ In contrast to H.R. 811, this bill does not require hand recounts of the voter-verified paper records it mandates.
¨ Recent elections have demonstrated that electronic voting equipment is extremely unreliable and vulnerable to tampering, and many people who support federal election reform are relying on audits of the paper records to ensure confidence in the results. Yet the expensive “audits” S. 1487 requires are mere spot checks, with nothing to prevent tamperers from knowing which precincts are to be audited well in advance of the start of the audit.
Please don’t think that this paper exhausts the list of the problems with this bill. Read it for yourself at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-1487. Then call your Senators and tell them that you oppose S. 1487, and before writing another bill they must learn more about the electronic voting machine industry, the use of electronic voting to disenfranchise minorities, and the past problems citizens and States have had with the EAC.
If necessary, refer them also to the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.
Originally posted at http://www.votersunite.org/info/s1487Report.asp.
I want to thank Teresa Hommel, Pokey Anderson, Mary Ann Gould, and Nancy Fay, whose edits and review comments contributed to this report.
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